I want to take this time to thank Eric Boehm for his contributions to the rebornpipes blog. I am posting this contemplative piece written by Eric some time ago for your reading pleasure. It is great to have some of the pieces that Eric has written available for each of us to read and enjoy. Thanks again Eric.

I’ve often wondered what makes pipe smoking special. Why writers, thinkers, contemplatives and philosophers advocated so strongly for the pipe. Was it simply Lady Nicotine calling or was there something deeper in the act of smoking a pipe?

Physicists tell us that the fourth dimension (after the three coordinate spatial dimensions of x, y & z) is time. Man’s preoccupation with time is all-consuming and dominates center stage of the human experience. Work, money, science, religion, war – indeed, human history itself – all share time as the central paradigm. Einstein and modern physics are obsessed with time. Time cognition or time awareness in humans therefore is central to the human condition. Therefore, any substance or human activity that alters our perception of time is of great interest. In my opinion, the ability to alter the perceived rate of time as experienced by pipe smokers is perhaps the true gift given from the New World Amerindian to the Old World European.

The consumption of tobacco in a pipe, being a protracted affair, forces you to stop normal activities related to work and play. And during this temporary cessation of daily activity, one is afforded the opportunity to look towards the horizon, ponder, and think on the larger picture. In this sense, protracted tobacco consumption in a pipe allows one to slow down – to cheat time in a sense.

This ability to slow time perception also is related to life span, I believe. In that animals and plants with longer life spans grow slower. If we measure animal life span by heartbeats, we realize that both the elephant and the mouse have the same number of heartbeats – about a billion and a half. It’s just that there is a greater interval of time between the beats in an elephant (28 beats/min.) with a corresponding lengthening of its life span as compared to the mouse (500/min.).
Doctors tell us a slower resting heart rate is the key to a longer life. It’s counter-intuitive that exercise which temporarily elevates the heart rate, in fact helps to lower the overall heart rate when the body is at rest, between exercise events, thus extending life. Of course time doesn’t really stop in the objective sense because of tobacco. But to the pipe smoker it seems to, in the subjective sense. And perhaps that’s all that really matters.

Doctors tell us anything that increases the distance between heart beats – anything that slows down the resting heart rate – lengthens life. Maybe when Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in the early 1500s, he didn’t realize he had the gift of life in hand already. It was called tobacco. The Indians smoking on the sidelines already knew this.

Pipe smoking eases you into the present moment – savor your pipe & you’ll savor your life.